SF anthology edited by John Joseph Adams. Twenty-two stories on the
general theme of mad scientists. Nominated for Best Editor (Short
Form).

And a very varied bunch they are; most of them have a
contemporary or near-future setting, though several are at various
points in the twentieth century or earlier, and one reaches back as
far as pre-Revolutionary Paris. Some deal with superheroes, others
with more conventional destroy-the-world and heh-heh-heh tropes.

As one might expect, quality is very variable too. None of the stories
really stood out to me as excellent, though there are some very good
lines here and there. Many suffer from the usual contemporary problem
of not actually having a story to tell, giving instead a slice of
life, with beginning left to be filled in by back-reference and ending
only hinted at. Some are short single-idea pieces, such as David D.
Levine's effective Letter to the Editor (in which a not-Superman's
arch-enemy explains why he does what he does); others are if anything
over-long, like Diana Gabaldon's The Space Between, which feels like
the first couple of chapters of a longer work. Surprisingly many
(Marjorie M. Liu's The Last Dignity of Man, Jeffrey Ford's The
Pittsburgh Technology, Naomi Novik's Rocks Fall) seem to have
nothing to say at all.

Seanan McGuire's Laughter at the Academy would have been much more
effective if I'd never read
A Miracle of Science and its
approach to Science-Related Memetic Disorder. That was so much better
at dealing with the ideas raised here that it cast a constant shadow
over this work, which being shorter had no possible scope for going
into such depth.

Probably the best of the stories, and it's one that comes at the brief
quite sideways, is Theodora Goss' The Mad Scientist's Daughter, in
which the daughters (creations, relicts) of various figures from other
fiction (including Justine Frankenstein and Catherine Moreau) come
together after the defeat of their parents/creators to try to lead
something like a normal life.

I think this may help to explain the problem, in fact, since we're
told all these stories were first published here and therefore at
least some of them may have been written specifically for this
anthology: the figure of the mad scientist is one steeped in cliché,
and while engaging with that cliché can produce some amusement
(Heather Lindsley's The Angel of Death Has a Business Plan) it's
very hard to write an original and interesting "straight" story from
such a concept. "If you want to get there, I wouldn't start from here
at all."

Obviously it's hard to apportion blame between authors and editor, but
while the individual stories here are mostly rather better than the
ones nominated for the Short Story Hugo I can't feel that it's much
cop as an anthology; it doesn't hang together well, some of the
stories are only tangentially related to the theme, and the fact that
the best story is among them (as well as arguably the worst story, the
Diana Gabaldon escapade which deals with alchemy and magic) suggests
that the theme itself wasn't a good choice.

Oh, and the editor's introductions to each story sometimes contain
significant revelations that the story's author was presumably hoping
to make at his/her own pace.